Ghyll:Ibaan Malmiz

Ser Ibaan Malmiz was born in -160 EC. He combined the roles of orthographer, cryptographer, gourmand, thespian, occultologist, religious nut, and Hive-Lord, a combination that is probably unique.

Malmiz's orthographical and palaeographical work with the famous manuscript Bordingbras his hatt! led directly to his rediscovery of the Clamorxian Decoding Method in -119 EC. The Method was a genuine contribution to scholarship but a commercial and artistic flop. We don't know exactly how all this led Malmiz to his unholy fascination with the Looliers and their disgusting cuisine, but probably it was his well-established inquisitive nature.

His inquisitiveness took a turn for the peculiar, to say the least, with the publication of his memoir recounting his supposed travels and sojourns throughout Ghyll, from the Sarfelogian Mountains in the north to the little-known cactus forests of the south. So much could be accepted as mere traveler's tales, a recognized genre of literature. But when Malmiz began to write rants about the "Ancient Ones" who lived in "Sayaziha, the City of Spheres", their gods Mmyogurt and Leemonje'lo, and their slaughter by the Looliers (for none of which is there a shred of evidence), his reputation in the scholarly world began to founder, and he found himself creating the school of occultologists, seemingly merely in order to have colleagues of some sort who would not despise him.

Malmiz bore the title "Ser" because he was technically a Hive-Lord, but he betrayed the most fundamental rule of Hive-Lord ethics: he set himself his own Question. There are various accounts of just what this Question was, from "What is the meaning of life?" to "How should we worship the Dark Goddess?" to "What can we do with sour Fefferberry juice?" Granted, no other Hive-Lord had ever set him one, but nevertheless, such behavior has been banned from the earliest ages until the present: no Hive-Lord has ever done it before, and we can be quite confident that none will ever do it again.

In his last years, Malmiz descended into frank paranoia, either because of his consumption of undesirable food, the cognitive loop by which he discovered the Method by discovering the Method, or his abandonment of, if not by, Shtreiml. Malmiz died in -99 EC -- or at any rate he was carried off (supposedly by a spirit in the form of a pink Aelfant, though I do not credit this) in that year and is presumed to be dead.

Citations: Clamorxian Decoding Method, Memoir, Shtreiml.

--John Cowan 23:00, 20 Jul 2005 (EDT)